Disruptive Empathy Must Also Be Sustainable
The soul price of indispensability
The technology sector (especially the modern startup culture) has long confused dedication with existential sacrifice. We worship the founder who sleeps under the desk and celebrate the engineer who fixes the catastrophic outage at three in the morning (we’ve all been there, and yes, sometimes it’s necessary). We use language like “we bleed for the product” and “we live and breathe this company.”
But what happens when the line between your job title and your sense of self dissolves? When the help you provide to the company starts costing you your core identity?
I have spent the better part of two decades witnessing this cost, from the trenches of infrastructure to the strategic boardroom. The phrase, “help that doesn’t cost your identity,” isn’t just a management mantra (it’s a necessary survival guide for longevity in a perpetually demanding field).
The Burden of the Hero Complex
In the early days of any venture (or even in mature, high-growth companies), there is immense pressure to be indispensable. This often falls hardest on those in Support and Infrastructure roles (the people who keep the lights on and the protocols running). You become the single point of failure, and your heroic effort to constantly solve problems becomes the only acceptable solution.
The cost is steep. It starts with small sacrifices (a forgotten hobby, a missed dinner) and escalates into a complete erosion of personal well-being. Your identity shifts from “I am a thoughtful person who builds resilient systems” to “I am the person who fixes the P1 fire.” When the company needs help, it takes a piece of you. It takes things like your sleep, your time with family, and your moral compass in a moment of ethical compromise. This tax is levied repeatedly until your entire sense of value is predicated on your current job performance.
This is unsustainable empathy. It is the antithesis of healthy leadership and robust strategy (it is merely a systemic failure cloaked in virtue signaling).
The unfortunate thing about this? It also prevents you from being proactive. It prevents you from thoughtfully preventing the fires you’re constantly extinguishing.
Scaling Empathy Through Systems
In the infrastructure world, we learned long ago that a reliance on a single person for uptime is a ticking time bomb. The solution to a complex scaling problem is never to hire a genius who works 24/7 (that person will burn out or quit). The solution is to distribute the load through intelligent systems. This powers the flywheel that refines unsustainable empathy into Disruptive Empathy.
This principle must be applied to emotional intelligence as well. True organizational empathy means structuring the environment so that individuals do not need to perpetually sacrifice themselves. True help, the kind that endures, is baked into the architecture, not balanced on the back of an exhausted person.
Think about modern distributed systems. Tools like Kubernetes (an open-source system for automating container deployment, scaling, and management) exist because we learned that manually managing containers across multiple nodes is inhumane and error-prone. Kubernetes helps by removing the crushing burden of manual oversight, allowing the infrastructure itself to self-heal and scale. It is automated help (help that doesn’t cost an operator their weekend or their sanity).
The goal, whether you are building vintage computers or modern cloud platforms, should be to abstract away the repetitive, draining labor and automate the non-judgmental response.
The Right Kind of Giving
For the individual (especially the empathetic leader or builder), finding help that doesn’t cost your identity requires a fierce commitment to boundaries.
Define your core: Know who you are outside of your product or role. What are the non-negotiable aspects of your life (family, health, values)? These are the identity items that must not be traded for quarterly targets.
Delegate the heroics: Stop catching every falling plate yourself. Build the process (the runbook, the documentation, the cross-training) that empowers others to solve the problem in a resilient, distributed way.
Choose your battles: When you offer help that involves personal sacrifice, ensure it is a choice made consciously for a meaningful, rare event (not a habit built from daily panic).
The future of work depends on this shift. We must move past the cult of the indispensable martyr and embrace the power of sustainable, systemic, and humane effort. Only then can we truly innovate, because only then are we operating from a place of wholeness (not depletion).
For more about the hero complex, see this post from September.